Seeing the Thirsty as God Does
Sunday, September 25 2011
Scripture Texts: Exodus 17:1-7 and Philippians 2:1-13
In the remote village of Foro, in the Konso district of southwestern Ethiopia, the life of a woman centers around one thing: providing for the thirst of your family. And by “thirst,” I don’t mean desires and dreams; I mean literal thirst. At least three times a day (sometimes, as many as five), every day of the year, the women and girls of the village climb the steep mountain on which they live, down and up, back and forth, 50 pounds of water strapped to their backs on each return journey back up the mountain. It takes an hour to reach the Toiro River with its dirty, unsafe water (dangerously low more often than not from drought). An hour down, an hour-and-then-some back, they walk – six to ten hours of each day devoted to this life-sustaining task. That’s the span of a full-time job, essentially, just to meet the basic need of thirst. And that’s far from the only work they do.[1]
Now I realize that there are things I take for granted. Every Monday is laundry day at my house. And every Monday I think about two things – first, how nice it is to only have the laundry of two people to do when I know so many others who do laundry for four, five, six or more. And second, I give thanks for whoever it was that invented the washing machine in its current form and saved my hands (and sanity) from the day-long task of washing and wringing out clothes, one-by-one, as my grandmothers did for well more than half their lives. While the washing machine does its work, I can complete other chores, and I wonder sometimes, whether I’d even be able to work outside the home—whether I’d be able to pursue my dreams and my calling (or even have the leisure to explore what a “dream” or “calling” is) were it not for all the appliances and machinery that have lifted burdens from my back. / And then this week, with this story of these Ethiopian women, I looked twice at my faucet. With barely the turn of my wrist, the work of a single second, I have clean water filling my glass. I usually don’t even think about it. It’s just there. And although I may be thirsty after a hard workout, talking a lot or consuming spicy food, I don’t think I’ve ever known true thirst – the kind of thirst that reminds you of your own mortality -- that your human body won’t last more than a few days without water.
A National Geographic photographer captured a haunting picture of a group of these Foro village women. Water containers in tow, their shadows long from the evening sun on what is probably their third or fourth trip for water that day, the women head off across a desert landscape, the horizon stretching far in front of them. It is a stark image of wilderness life – these women and their shadows, spread out and walking away, eyes set on the horizon. In the moment the photo was captured, it shows no evidence of conversation - just a simple, shared, undeterred focus on sustaining life – on meeting a basic human need.[2]
Personally, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what that’s like. And so this week, as I read and heard reflection after reflection on Exodus 17 from persons who also have probably never known true, life-stopping thirst, I got a little defensive at all the better-than-thou attitudes.
Safe in our social location, we’re quick, I think, to pooh-pooh the Israelites whining and complaining about how hard they’ve got it. We’re quick to stand beside Moses, miffed that the Israelites can’t just stay grateful for their deliverance from Pharaoh. When they complain against Moses, we pick a fight right back, our voices joined with Moses, taking his lead to label their complaints as an affront on God and a lack of faith. From outside the world of the text, we pour ourselves a nice, large glass of ice water for one hand while using the other to point out Israelite faults. And with a long drink to wet our whistle, we cheer Moses teaching the people a lesson by labeling the place “Massah and Meribah,” or “Test and Quarrel.” Well, shame on us.
How awfully easy it is to harshly judge people’s actions in situations of desperation we know not. I’ve seen dirty looks given to families pulling out EBT cards to utilize food stamp benefits in the grocery store lines, the nonchalant perusals of their purchase choices by those behind them in line. I know we’ve all heard the disgusted comments of self-righteous individuals looking down their noses at people with addiction problems, insisting that they could “just stop” if they really wanted to. It doesn’t take but turning on the t.v. to see how our culture is so thoroughly saturated with an idea that the “American Dream” is just as accessible to one person as the next, that it’s led to judgment. Despite your background, your life’s obstacles, your lack of connections and money, despite whatever wildernesses through which you may have come or are still travelling, all you’re supposed to really need, the dream says, is a bootstrap mentality…so if you aren’t making it, you aren’t trying hard enough. There’s something wrong with you that needs fixing. Perhaps one of the most troubling places I see our society pooh-poohing people without seeking to understand their situations of desperation is in the area of foreign relations – how we so easily view those who disagree with us as lesser, those with whom we are at war as more evil than ourselves, and how we seek to label individuals with the dehumanizing title of “illegal alien,” a term we use in lieu of other titles they may have such as “mother,” “father,” “loved child of God.” It’s easier not to think of them that way; it’s easier not to identify with their places of desperation and their willingness to do anything in seeking a better life for their children, just as we would. Yes, it is awfully easy to stand outside the picture of wilderness and point fingers of judgment at those whose situations we don’t understand because we don’t care to try.
How much harder it is to ask the more faithful, empathetic question of “What’s really going on here?” How much harder it is to put on the mind of Christ, as the Apostle Paul calls us. In Jesus Christ, God came to us, taking human form, humbling God’s self in extreme ways, so to understand and be present in the places where we all stand, so to understand “what’s really going on in our lives.” Commissioned as the body of Christ in the world today, do we do likewise for one another?
The role to which we should be looking in the story is God’s, not Moses’. When Moses turns to God in the story, he does not speak to the people’s petition for water, but instead, offers up his own petition: “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.” But like a mother analyzing her young children’s behavior, God knows what’s really going on: God’s children are thirsty, Moses included. There is a basic need to be met. So God ignores both Moses’ and the Israelites’ behavior because God sees their place of desperation, and God simply will not leave them to thirst.
Will we? I ask this question of myself each and every time persons in need/persons at places of thirst come to our church for help. Some come complaining, wondering where God is in their lives; others come angry. Most come carefully with their requests, with a certain expressed humility they perhaps feel they need to show (whether they feel it or not) because they know what behaviors won’t get them anywhere with Moses. For all persons I meet in desperate places, I try to take care in reminding myself that God created them, God loves them, God has cried with them through their hard experiences of life, and God is seeking to meet their needs of thirst. They just need a little guidance to the water.
And that is where we come in, as Moses did, looking for the place where God is standing, looking for a place of possibility where perhaps we haven’t before, believing in and opening ourselves to God’s power to make water flow from rocks and other hard, improbable places. Because places of wilderness aren’t meant to be the end of anyone’s story, / and water can flow in the desert. By the power of God, yes it can.
God’s thirsty people need a drink of cool water, and God is there, waiting to give it to them with our help. The people just have to see the oases, and we…just have to see the people in the way that God does.
One of the things I most cherish about our church being a part of the Harvest Table ministry is the growing understanding individuals are gaining for “what’s really going on” in the lives of participants as they return again and again and volunteers get to know them. Jesus knew it better than we did, but we’re catching on: there’s something incredibly special about table fellowship with strangers and those we view as “other.” It doesn’t take long before we know people beyond their places of desperation, before we recognize the simple needs for food, shelter, community, connections…hope. It doesn’t take long before we unequivocally see the child of God in the person across from us. Where walls of misperception and ill-construed expectation come down, there Christ appears.
Preacher, Fred Craddock identifies a common problem with our theology to be the idea that “When the Messiah comes there will be no more suffering.” But we’ve got it backwards, Fred attests. What the Bible really tells us, again and again, he says, is that “Where there is suffering, there the Messiah will come.”[3]
Let us be blessed by the presence of Christ. Let us be blessed…because we have tuned our ears beyond first impressions and the common perceptions of the world, seeking instead to better understand others’ places of desperation in the wilderness. Let us be blessed… because like God at the rock of Horeb, we too are determined to be present, to be gracious, to be Christ…and to let the water flow freely in the desert. Amen.
[1] Tina Rosenberg, “The Burden of Thirst” in National Geographic Magazine, April 2010.
[2] Lynn Johnson, National Geographic Image Collection (copyright protected).
[3] Fred Craddock in “Is God With Us or Not,” blog of Steve Harsh, September 13, 2011.
